New Gap Logo: Next Tropicana-Style Redesign Flop?

The marketing geniuses at The Gap seem to have fiddled around with Photoshop for a few minutes and designed a new company logo that’s as bland and uninteresting as jeans and a black t-shirt. It’s not ugly, but it’s not memorable or creative, either. What were they thinking?

No one knows. According to AdAge, the logo change came without fanfare and the company hasn’t commented on it publicly. It’s probably just as well, because no one seems to like the new design. AdAge sums it up:

Of course a brand is more than a logo, but as far as logos go, Gap’s is an icon. Across the internet detractors have been picking apart the new look, with the most common sentiment being that it looks like something a child created using a clip-art gallery.

Don’t be ridiculous. No, today’s children have much more talent and design savvy than that.

While Gap remains silent, a parody Twitter account has appeared to fill the, er, gap. Unlike the parody BP account, it doesn’t have more followers than the real company–but at least it tries to give the boring lump of Helvetica some personality.

Funny thing: I clicked around, not really reading the text, looking for the new logo. Then I realized that that *is* the new logo. It looks like something someone came up with using Publisher in a school project.

I think the blue square actually makes it worse. Sure, a three-letter word with a white background is simple, but simplicity sometimes works. In this case, the blue square makes the logo even less inspired, because it looks like someone actually tried to do something different with it. I might be alone in thinking this, but failing with effort is blander than imitation.

People care very much. When Tropicana changed its logo to something that represented Safeway’s generic “Select” brand, there market share plummeted 20% relative to their competitors’. Here’s an article on it:

People (should) care very much about what their logo looks like. It’s not just a pretty drawing. It’s communicates what your business does or sells. If your logo does not fit the personality of your business model, then you will not attract the right clients.

Only people who care more about the logo than the product/service. Unfortunately because people care about the logos of companies they blindly buy despite how the product is. For all some people know, another company with a crap logo is better than these *ahem* “good” logos.

It looks like it goes along with modern trends to have almost boring logos and typefaces. Like the McDonald’s “i’m lovin’ it.”

Only in this case they took it too far and instead of being a bold, stylish design it just looks boring. I don’t think it’s amateurish though… It just looks like the word “Gap” typed on a street sign or something. Certainly boring and forgettable and not recognizable as a logo which means it fails in its goals of identifying the brand and building brand awareness.

That square in the corner looks like corporate thinking. “It looks too boring. Put a square on it!”

“Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to… see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”

So now they’re asking for new logo designs on spec, which if you’re at all involved in the design world, is sleezy and all kinds of not okay.

Ohhh maybe. There is just something in there that just feels …… like a joke. I could totally see them asking people to design it, i.e. spec. And then they’ll award some joke of a prize like 100$ shopping spree.

My company is currently redesigning its logo for the 50th anniversary (the last time it changed was 40 years ago) and I’m scared they’re going to choose something awful. Hopefully the folks they’ve contracted with to design it have better sense than this.

That blue square annoys the hell ouf of me. If they want to go with the minimalist helvetica logo, that’s fine. But it looks like they did that and then felt that they HAD to add something, so they tossed in a MS paint box.

To me this looks like the agency/designer had a couple of months to work on it but blew it off until the day of the presentation, then mocked this up at a stop light on the drive to the Gap corporate office.

Possibly it didn’t cause an uproar because the newer logo was not as cheap/lame as the one they put out now. I love GAP, and I wear it all the time. This logo will force me to not buy any logo shirts/caps from them though.

As a graphic designer who worked at one of the largest branding agencies in the world, I can tell you that they probably paid somewhere in the upper 6 figures for that logo. I have no idea why they had to mess with a good thing.

Dear Gap, change it back! Total coincidence that last night I was using a couple old Gap bags to pack clothes within my suitcase (like stuff sacks – really helpful!) and I actually thought to myself that I liked the logo (tall skinny caps) much better than the way old logo of decades ago…. This new one looks more like the really old one. Bring back the the tall caps logo!